In the hands of the right creative types, King Lear can be more than a British king going slightly mad, and Hamlet can be more than a Danish prince who talks to a dead court jester’s skull.

It’s hard to tell how those two guys would have fared being chased by bad guys through the streets of Rome in a sports car or trying not to be thrown off a speeding train in the middle of a fight. Yet director Sam Mendes believes the 53-year film legacy of James Bond isn’t that different from those of the great characters in history.

“I come from a world where they’ve been doing productions of Richard III for 400 years,” says Mendes, 50. “It doesn’t make the play any less fresh. It’s about the way the world views it and interpreting it for the current generation.”

Mendes’ take on the English superspy, and his portrayal by the latest Bond, Daniel Craig, have made 007 more popular than ever. The last Bond film, 2012’s Skyfall, was the first to break $1 billion internationally, and the twosome is back for more with Spectre (in theaters Friday), the next chapter that forges the franchise’s future with a mix of old-school Bond and modern themes.

And compared to the Bond movies of old — entertaining stand-alone stories with Bond wooing beautiful women, saving the world and looking good doing it — things have gotten downright Shakespearean.

Spectre is the climax of a four-movie saga begun in Craig’s first movie, 2006’s Casino Royale, and continued in 2008's Quantum of Solace. The film digs into Bond’s childhood while having him emotionally affected by the deaths of a love (Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd) as well as a mentor (Judi Dench’s M) and putting him on a collision course with the nefarious organization SPECTRE.

It’s a rebooted version of the group with an octopus-like sigil that threatened Sean Connery’s Bond in several films starting with 1962’s Dr. No and is headed up by the enigmatic Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), a mystery man with a chilling confession for Bond: “It was me, James. The author of all your pain.”

Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) heads up the shadowy organization of SPECTRE, a throwback from James Bond movies of the 1960s.(Photo11: Jonathan Olley)

Craig, 47, “has been able to unearth some of Bond’s deepest emotional conflicts, and that’s made his portrayal of the character so engaging,” says producer Barbara Broccoli, daughter of original Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli. “He’s brought a lot of humanity to the role, and that’s why the public has responded.”

Bond is a global brand but American audiences have embraced the legendary character with gusto, especially in the Craig years, says Rentrak senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. Bond is the archetypal guy who “can order the best wine in the house one minute and dispatch many villains in the next,” Dergarabedian says, and the Mendes/Craig duo have done what Christopher Nolan did for Batman, bringing “a certain level of pathos and intelligence that goes beyond this idea of what Bond is and giving him a soul.”

Putting aside one-and-done stories and focusing on a continuous narrative that explored Bond’s back story — much of it mined from the Ian Fleming novels of the '50s and '60s — wasn’t an easy choice for Mendes when making Skyfall.

“I was worried the audience would be turned off by the fact that Bond was aging,” the director explains. “There is an acknowledgement of the passing of time, which there had never been in any other Bond movie, really.

“Nobody talks about his age — it’s almost like real time doesn’t exist. They exist in a vacuum, and that’s part of the pleasure of it.”

Instead of finding a resistance from fandom, people got excited “that somewhere buried in an action movie was a meditation on mortality and loss,” Mendes says. Another help: the popularity of the long-form storytelling model on TV and in movies. “You’ve got different chapters of the Bourne story, different chapters of the Dark Knight story, different chapters of the Marvel universe that all interlink, and that that’s not an unusual thing now.”

What also needed to mature was Bond himself. The martini-swilling throwback of yesteryear doesn’t work in society anymore, and the tweaking of a sophisticated dinosaur has been the beauty of Craig’s tenure, says Matt Gourley, co-host of the James Bonding podcast.

“Even though this is an action hero, he’s not a role model,” Gourley says. “He’s a sociopath and a horrible misogynist. But at the same time, a lot of the best movies are watching flawed characters. As long as you don’t take it as something you should aspire to be, it’s fun to watch.”

French actress Léa Seydoux, who plays Bond’s Spectre love interest, Dr. Madeleine Swann, respects the fact that as 007 fare has gotten darker and dug into the hero’s psychology, “he’s more feminine. He’s more vulnerable and fragile.”

So her character is also stronger than Bond women of old. Madeleine initially doesn’t want to have anything to do with Bond or his super-secret world, she has no problem yelling at him, and at one point even saves him during a violent train scuffle with monstrous SPECTRE henchman Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista).

James Bond (Daniel Craig) needs some help when battling Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista) on a train in 'Spectre.'(Photo11: Jonathan Olley)

Having Bond pretty much lose a major fight was all Craig’s idea, Bautista says. “He thought it would be great if Bond just for one time gets his (butt) handed to him. It’s something new and different that makes him more interesting. It gives people a reason to root for him.”

Mendes wanted to give 007 bigger-picture obstacles to tackle, too. The main plot of Skyfall — which revolved around Britain’s MI6 being attacked and having its secret agents exposed to the world — reflected the real-world presence of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and Spectre is a post-Edward Snowden movie where a government honcho (Andrew Scott) seeks to dismantle the “double-0” program and instead use drones and high-tech surveillance to spy around the globe.

“We can’t pretend anymore that MI5 and MI6 are unquestionably the good guys in the way that you could when Bond was at the height of the Cold War,” Mendes says. “The general public — myself included — feel that they are actually spying on us, not just people who deserve to be spied on. … Bond is the old-school way of doing things and represents the man who needs to be on the ground and to look someone in the eye before making a life-and-death call."

Including those types of themes are just as important as the escapism and the fantasy, the filmmaker adds. “You’re trying to make it in some way kind of a commentary on a contemporary world at the same time as taking people on a thrilling ride. That is a balance that I feel the best Bond movies are able to strike.”

It’s certainly a different time than 20 years ago when Broccoli recalls they were about to make Pierce Brosnan’s first Bond film, GoldenEye. “People were saying: ‘The world has changed. It’s a safe place now. The Berlin Wall has crumbled. Is Bond relevant?’ And we sure learned after that that the world is indeed not a safer place and there is an increased need for people like James Bond.”

Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux on location in Morocco for 'Spectre.'(Photo11: Jonathan Olley)

Bond has become a part of so many people’s lives that, in a way, he’s almost like an American president: Sometime during an actor’s tenure, fans start wondering who’ll play 007 next. And everybody has an opinion about it.

Idris Elba, for one, is a favorite to be the next version of the hero in some corners of the Internet, and Bond novelist Anthony Horowitz caused a ruckus in September by saying he’d be “too street.” Craig has caused even more fancasting when he recently said in an interview with the U.K.’s Time Out magazine he’d rather “slit his wrists” than play Bond again. “I’m over it at the moment. All I want to do is move on.”

Producer Michael G. Wilson, who has been a part of every Bond film since 1979’s Moonraker, definitely wants Mendes and Craig back for another but allows that “everybody feels like they own the character because it is part of the culture. They feel they have a personal stake in the decisions that are being made.”

Seydoux, 30, says that to remain relevant, 007 has to change with the times: “It would be good to have a black Bond or a homosexual Bond.” Dergarabedian agrees: “Bond has never been that revolutionary, but he’s evolutionary. It’s more about staying true to what that character is essentially all about and not a narrow-minded idea about what the casting should be.”

Mendes tends to cut himself off from “the white noise” that surrounds the blockbuster franchise. For him, Bond is a torch passed between generations who can go anywhere that someone with an imagination wants to take him.

“Any one actor can play Hamlet, and it will be an exciting and different take, but Hamlet will still survive. One feels that way about Bond,” Mendes says. “That’s not to say that Daniel hasn’t been and isn’t a special and brilliant Bond, but it’s not the only Bond out there.”